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Sony Sued Over Bricked PS3s
Zarrot writes "If Sony's recent 3.00 PS3 firmware update bricked your console, you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony. The complaint alleges that thousands of users (PDF) were affected by the update, and in some cases the PS3 hardware itself was damaged. It continues, 'For owners who sustained hardware damage from the Sony-required update, Sony is charging a $150 repair fee per unit. Sony, responding to the numerous complaints about the unacceptable effects of the defective update, released a further, optional update that it claimed "improves system stability" — yet performance problems continued, and the new update did nothing to remedy the systems of users who sustained hardware damage."'"
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by greedy self-interest. Is it possible that this was deliberate? After all, they deliberately rooted thousands of PCs (inclusing mine) a few years ago, so you KNOW they're evil even by corporate standards, and they're charging $150 to fix a problem that their "update" caused.
They won't brick MY PS3, because there's no way in hell I'll buy another product from the company that rooted my computer with a trojan in a music CD. Why do people keep buying stuff from this company? I won't -- once bitten, twice shy. Buy from Sony and you're asking to get screwed, with sand as lube.
Free Martian Whores!
I had the misfortune of buying one of their GPS units. Despite the fact that their support clearly acknowledged the defects the unit had from the day of purchase, Sony did not release a fix until 7 months later. Sony insists that I pay $99.95 to get that update. Needless to say, I no longer will buy Sony products.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
So now Nintendo and Sony have both managed to brick consoles with firmware updates. Great.
Sorry, fellas. YOU broke it, YOU don't get to bill US to fix your mistakes.
you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony.
I'm probably being excessively pedantic, but you don't need a class action suit to have "legal recourse." It's just easier as a class. You can sue on your own if your property was damaged or a contract was violated.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
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I went with microsoft instead of sony...
I don't think these are really "bricked" consoles, are they? They boot, but they malfunction. That's not "bricking" anything.
Or, more accurately in this case, you buy it, we break it.
Well I suppose a bricked console is "stable", isn't it?
Sony is REPEATEDLY caught doing nefarious things. Rootkits on a CD. Deleting 2/3rds of a MMO (The Star Wars Galaxies NGE) the day after selling an expansion for it, which included features marketed that applied to the 2/3rds that got deleted. They've gotten caught multiple times price fixing CDs. They have released a version of the PSP, called the PSPGo that requires you to repurchase all your games. They've also been caught deploying astroturfers and viral marketers to fake reviews and artificially pump their products.
They also run what I believe is an illegal international lottery with respect to their "trading" card games in their MMOs.
So why would it surprise anyone that Sony, not exactly well known for the quality of their coding work (if SOE is representative of it) would release a buggy firmware that destroys hardware and then make people pay $150 to fix their own defect?
Sony is all about revenue streams! Stealing from their customers is just yet another one of those.
This suit is going to cost them millions and will no doubt harm their reputation even more than all of the above have. Sony must not care about their reputation, since they do nothing at all constructive to improve it. Hint: repeatedly assfucking your customers does NOT a good reputation make.
Corporatism != Free Market
Any recourse on my part?
Well, there are a few things you could do.
Unfortunately, these methods may be of dubious legality. But it's nice to daydream.
Free Martian Whores!
... if they'd simply added a clause to the End User License agreement to state that the hardware still belonged to them and the "owner" was merely "renting it" :)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
I have the same model and didn't run into any issues; however, I waited until the next upgrade. I always wait and see if my console will get bricked before doing any firmware updates ;)
As far as the console getting to hot, I picked up a cooling station for the PS3 and it has helped keep it running cooler (if not more quietly). Also be sure you've got enough airspace for proper ventilation.
This is why I continue to buy PCs I like to have a lot of control over my gaming system. That and Consoles are simply trying to play catch up with PCs still. Seriously only this generation has just now gotten 'online' support. The fact you have to pay for online capability on some systems is ridiculous too. It now seems that Sony is far from it's glory days of the PS1 and Nintendo far from theirs with the Super Nintendo.
All in all, its just another Brick in the wall
After all that, if they win, every customer will get their machine fixes for free but with a 4-6 week turn around time, they customer will still have to pay $20-$35 for shipping the borked machine back, and get a nice voucher for $35 to reimburse the shipping cost usable in the Playstation Online store. Meanwhile the lawyers will get a multi-million dollar paycheck out of the victory.
Sony - 0
Consumer - 1
Lawyers - 10
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Great -- so affected users have a shot at getting a check for like, eight dollars in acouple of years while some lawyer gets rich. Gotta love that...
Caveat Utilitor
When it doesn't do what it's supposed to do (or stops doing what it's supposed to do), yeah, that's bricked.
No. It's bricked when there is no hope at all at making it playable again. If it can execute code, it's not bricked.
Honestly dude, It's bad enough the sensationalist media cannot use the term correctly.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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Years ago, I bought their first "slim" digital camera. The DSC-T1. Shortly after buying it, I managed to break the totally unprotected LCD. I took full responsibility and called them up. "How much will it cost to have the screen replaced?" "If it was out of warranty, the cost would be $130 but defective screen is covered by your warranty." "No, it's not defective. I broke it. There's no way I could possibly pass this off as a manufacturing defect even if I was sleazy enough to try." "Oh, then it's $180." "What? Why does this cost more than a regular out of warranty repair?" "It just does."
And I was fucked. It was a brand new model so the chances of a "parts" listing showing up on ebay any time soon was pretty much zero. I was already into the camera for $500. The best grey-market refurb price I could find anywhere was $400. So I paid the out of warranty repair cost PLUS the $50 "because we're dicks" fee. It was either have a $680 camera or burn the $500 I'd already spent. When the repaired camera arrived, I affixed a thin sheet of plastic over the LCD. I swore I'd never purchase another Sony product as long as I lived. That lasted about 3 years when I bought one of their photo printers (which I still use occasionally). And I've bought another camera (mixed feelings about its quality), a book reader (rocks), a cell phone (rocked), etc.
Sony's like an ex who steals money from your wallet, badmouths you to her friends, and orders steak-n-lobster when meet up for lunch but the couple times a year you hook up seem so worth it. Until you check your wallet the next day and you swear you won't answer the phone next time she calls. And it works for a few months. But then you run into her at the mall and going to dinner is safe enough. God, she looks good...
Why do all the +5 Insightful comments have NOTHING to do with the article? Just "DONT BUY SONY THEYRE TEH EVILZ!" This is as bad as it used to be with Microsoft articles back in the day.
To all of the DONT BUY SONY CUZ THEYRE TEH EVILZ can you recommend me which game console to buy? Oh and please don't say PC, I game hours a day on my PC but I also like having a console for the console only games. Please tell me which console is not made by an evil corporation and doesn't brick with firmware upgrades? The ROCK SOLID 360? The Wii and it's recent hardware killing firmware too? Guess what, I'm going to buy the console that has the games I want. For me that's the PS3 and soon the Wii.
For the record my PS3, and the PS3's of my friends (yes, I know others with them) haven't bricked, so this is far from a EVERYONES PS3 JUST DIED that some people like to make it out to be. Saying don't buy a PS3 because SoE sucks or they released a rootkit 4 years ago is up there with saying don't buy Microsoft because Bob sucked or because they killed Netscape. Pretty much EVERY major corporation has done something evil.
Feel free to mod me down, I got some Karma to burn.
Are you ENTIRELY certain, that nuking Japan is against the law in other countries?
Personally I'd be surprised if you could find that in the books anywhere except perhaps Japan.
I'm not endorsing, just saying that it might not be as illegal as you think.
I can 100% attest to the fact that the PS3 update 3.0 and 3.01 did indeed disable my system. My system (a 60GB) worked flawlessly for 2 years until 3.0, which caused issues in regard to getting into games online. 3.01 broke dvd, and blu-ray playback, and caused freezing issues with the XMB which you couldn't exit while playing a game if accessed. I called Sony, they told me there was no troubleshooting for the issue and it would $150. I spoke to a supervisor, who in so many words said. 1) You can't prove it was the firmware. 2) Even if it was the firmware, we accept Sony takes no responsibility as per terms of the agreement when we download the firmware. Of course, we're force to agree to this 'agreement' when we're forced to download the firmware. Anyway, I consulted Sony's own forums which were ablaze with complaints. A user fix 'rebuild the database' fixed my system in less than 10 minutes. So here is my proof that the firmware did indeed disable at least some systems.
As a software engineer, I feel some sympathy for those who release patches for desktop computer OSes. A computer is a general-purpose device that is intended to allow users to install third-party applications that have full access to a huge API; to install applications like antivirus utilities that dig deep into the OS; and add hardware and the low-level drivers that go with them. The OS update is applied to an environment that may have wandered far from its starting point. Every customer has a unique configuration that probably has meaningful differences from any box in the SQA department.
But a game console? A game console is a walled garden, the applications need only a circumscribed set of functions, the vendor has total control over what goes on it, and nobody is adding third-party hardware to it.
Sony should be ashamed of itself, and should have volunteered to fix damaged systems for free--long before anyone complained.
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